Autonomy’s focus on the future of work requires expertise from a range of fields. We draw from the disciplines of political and digital economy, machine learning and data science, feminist economics, welfare sociology, architecture and critical theory amongst others. We collaborate with research partners across all relevant disciplines.

For contact and collaboration: info@autonomy.work

Core Team

Will Stronge

Will is Autonomy’s Director of Research. With Helen Hester, he is currently writing Post-work (Bloomsbury 2021).

will@autonomy.work

Kyle Lewis

Kyle is an Associate Lecturer in the Health and Social Sciences department at the University of the West of England and a researcher at the University of West London. He is currently writing a book on the history and future of the shorter working week (Verso, 2020)

kyle@autonomy.work

Maria Dada

Maria is Research Fellow at the Digital Anthropology Lab at UAL and Visiting Lecturer in the Media, Culture and Language department at Roehampton University. Her research is placed within the fields of design and material culture.

Julian Siravo

Julian is an Architect and Urbanist from Rome, Italy. He has spent time both in commercial and research-based architectural practices, as well as working independently in the practice he co-founded in 2015, Rowhill Studio. In his work Julian has explored automated construction, ideas of post-familial domesticity and socialized care-work. He heads Autonomy_Urban, with a focus on ageing populations and the future of care, logistics and workspace.

julian@autonomy.work

Hina Pandya

Hina is our Industry Engagement Lead, establishing relationships with firms interested in trialling shorter working hours. She specialises in business strategy and has a track record of initiating large projects with corporates such as Google, as well as nascant start-ups that run innovative organisational structures.

hina@autonomy.work

Jack Haslehurst

Jack is Autonomy’s design lead. He has a background across graphic and digital design, film and art direction. His role is to ensure that our presentation is innovative, actionable and well communicated.

Autonomy Data Unit (ADU)

Lukas Kikuchi

Lukas is a specialist in stochastic processes, large deviations theory and statistical physics. Alongside Ishan Khurana, he forms part of the Autonomy Data Unit (ADU), which produces cutting-edge data research and visualisation on the present and future of work.

Ishan Khurana

Ishan’s expertise lies in developing machine learning techniques for dark matter searches using dual phase xenon detectors. Alongside Lukas Kikuchi, he forms part of the Autonomy Data Unit (ADU) which produces cutting-edge data research and visualisation on the present and future of work.

Advisory Board

Helen Hester

Helen is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, social reproduction, and post-work politics, and she is a member of the international feminist working group Laboria Cuboniks. Her books include Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and After Work: The Politics of Free Time (Verso, 2020, with Nick Srnicek)

Nick Srnicek

Nick is Lecturer in Digital Economy in the Digital Humanities department at King’s College London. His current research is focused on post-work politics and social reproduction, and how the two separate areas can be fit together. He is the co-author, with Dr. Helen Hester, of a forthcoming book, entitled After Work (Verso, 2020) and has previously written on labour market transformations – Inventing the Future (co-authored with Dr. Alex Williams, Verso, 2015) – and on the digital economy and its dynamics: Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016).

Kathi Weeks

Kathi Weeks teaches in the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Program at Duke University. Her primary interests are in political theory, feminist theory, Marxist thought, the critical study of work, and utopian studies. She is the author of Constituting Feminist Subjects (re-issued by Verso in 2018) and The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke UP, 2011), and a co-editor of The Jameson Reader (Blackwell, 2000).

Alice Martin

Alice is a Labour Specialist at PIRC and an Associate Fellow at the New Economics Foundation

Partnership Researchers

We are collaborating with TECHNE and CHASE Doctoral Training Programmes to deliver placements for emergent researchers in the field.

Natasha Osben

Natasha is a doctoral researcher based in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on the future of work and the limits of welfare conditionality in the U.K. As part of her partnership with Autonomy, Natasha will be developing concepts related to the future of welfare, specifically on questions of space and service.

William Jamieson

William Jamieson is a doctoral researcher in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work explores the political-economic and cultural dimensions of Singapore’s land reclamation project and the intense sand extraction across Southeast Asia that resources it. As part of his partnership with Autonomy, William will be researching the socially and ecologically just possibilities of post-growth economics.

Joe Jones

Joe Jones is a doctoral researcher in the Philosophy department at the University of Kent. His research focuses on the philosophical implications of automation, and explores possible applications of the writings of Hannah Arendt to the future of work. As part of his partnership with Autonomy, Joe will be researching the social, political and economic history of working time reduction in the UK.

Armelle Skatulski

Armelle Skatulski is a doctoral researcher at the Royal College of Art. Her research considers the (work) accident as an economic problem from a bio- political perspective and traces procedures that disqualify the abnormality of death in the context of work. As part of her partnership with Autonomy, Armelle will research processes leading to the expansion and normalisation of work casualisation and precarity in the contemporary workplace.

Research Affiliates

We have a wide network of researchers working in related fields and with which we learn and collaborate with.

Stephanie Sherman

Stephanie is a producer, researcher, and strategist working at the intersection of social and speculative design. Her projects activate latent surplus and stories to reorganize outmoded systems into platforms for co-production.

Danielle Guizzo Archela

Danielle is a Lecturer in Economics at University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). She is a member of the INET Young Scholars Initiative, the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) and the Reteaching Economics group.

James Trafford

James is Reader in Philosophy and Design at the University for the Creative Arts, Epsom UK. His current research is focused on political reasoning, structural injustices, and collective freedom. He has been published in numerous journals, gallery catalogues and design-books, including co-editing the collection of essays Speculative Aesthetics (Urbanomic, 2015), writing Meaning in Dialogue (Springer Press, 2017), and is currently writing a monograph provisionally entitled Militant Reasoning: Politics from Below .

Sharon Wright

Sharon Wright is an international expert in welfare reform and the marketisation of employment services. Her research primarily concerns the lived experiences of policy implementation (user and front-line workers), welfare governance, conditionality, street-level bureaucracy, agency and the active welfare subject. She has been an Expert Adviser to the Scottish Parliament Social Security Committee.

Dalia Gebrial

Dalia is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate at LSE, working on race and gender in the platform economy. She has also recently contributed to and co-edited a volume on Decolonising the University with Gurminder Bhambra and Kerem Nisancioglu.

Diann Bauer

Diann is an artist and writer based in London. She is part of the working group Laboria Cuboniks who in 2015 wrote Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation and the collaborative A.S.T. based in Miami, whose focus is speculative urbanism and climate change. Bauer has screened and exhibited internationally at Tate Britain, the ICA and The Showroom, London, The Sharjah Biennale 13, UAE, Deste Foundation, Athens, The New Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. She has taught and lectured widely at universities and cultural institutions including: UCA Epsom, Cornell University, Yale University and Cooper Union (US), HKW (Germany), DAI (Netherlands), Ashkal Alwan (Lebanon), Goldsmiths, UAL, The Baltic, The Tate and the ICA (UK).

Anna Dent

Anna is an independent public policy consultant and researcher based in Bristol. Her work focuses on employment and skills issues, with particular interests in low paid work and in-work poverty, welfare reform and conditionality, basic income, the changing world of work and the dynamics of policy change. She has worked extensively with local and regional government on strategic change, innovation and devolution, and holds a Masters degree from the University of Bristol, completed as a mature student. She is a fellow of the RSA.

Callum Cant

Callum Cant is a PhD researcher at the University of West London focusing on strike movements in the UK since 2008 and the future of work. He is currently writing a book on Deliveroo (Polity, 2019).

David Frayne

David is a writer and social researcher interested in critical social theory, the sociology of work, consumer culture, political ecology, the sociology of happiness, and utopian studies. His first book, The Refusal of Work, was published by Zed books in 2015. His follow-up, The Work Cure – an edited collection of critical essays on work and health – is published by PCCS.

Kendra Briken

Kendra Briken is a lecturer at Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow. Her current research concerns precarious work in the gig economy and beyond. She is interested in the emerging varieties of automation, the related power structures, and how they are impacting on work and life. Her latest publications include ‘Welcome in the machine. Human-machine relations and knowledge capture‘ In: Capital & Class, and Beyond constrained choice – labour market coercion and oppressive work in Amazon fulfilment centres, Industrial Relations Journal, 49 (5-6), with Phil Taylor.

Matt Cole

Matt is a researcher within the Work and Employment Relations Division of the Leeds University Business School (LUBS) working on the processes and politics of service work. He is the coordinator of the IIPPE Political Economy of Work Group and a member of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association.

Emily Jones

Emily is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex. Emily is a feminist international legal theorist researching on, among other things, automation and military technologies and the role of law and policy in the future of work. Emily has written various publications and co-edited a Special Issue entitled ‘Gender, War and Technology: Peace and Armed Conflict in the 21st Century’.

Jamie Woodcock

Jamie is an independent researcher his current research focuses on digital labour, sociology of work and resistance. His first book Working the Phones (Pluto, 2017) was an ethnographic study of working conditions in call centres in the UK. His most recent work – Marx at the Arcade focuses on the video games industry.

Tom O'Shea

Tom O’Shea is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton. His work focuses mainly on freedom in history, theory, and practice. He also have interests in critical theory, civic republicanism, disability, and the nature of normativity. In much of his research, he draws on the history of philosophy to help make sense of contemporary ethical and political problems. His current research concentrates on three main areas: Civic republicanism, Conscience and Self-legislation.

Nina Power

Nina is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton. Her current research concerns the contemporary reality and future of work, questioning in particular the relationship between social reproduction, capitalism, labour and technology. She is particularly attentive to second-wave feminist arguments regarding the future of reproductive technology as well as the automation and mechanisation of the workplace. In 2009 she published the influential One Dimensional Woman (Zero Books) that has become a key coordinate of contemporary feminist debates in this field.

Phil Jones

Phil is a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex focusing on cultural representations of the digital economy. He is currently writing a book about tasking and crowdwork.

Patrick Carmichael

Patrick Carmichael is an expert in education systems and the intersection between pedagogy and work. As a teacher, researcher and developer, he has been concerned with critical and emancipatory perspectives on the role of digital technologies in education, training and work. More recently, his research has explored ways in which educational systems and practices might change in in response to changes in the nature and distribution of work. He is currently writing a book about Felix Guattari entitled Education, Inquiry and Activism , which will be published in 2019.

Dr Phoebe V. Moore

Phoebe Moore’s research looks at the impact of technology on work from a critical perspective, looking at quantification through wearable tracking and algorithmic decision-making as a set of management techniques where control and resistance emerge as well as new risks of psychosocial and physical violence. She is author of The Quantified Self in Precarity (Routledge) and The International Political Economy of Work and Employability (Palgrave Macmillan).

Philipp Frey

Philipp is a PhD researcher at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany). He is interested in critical theory and social philosophy, automation, post-work politics and alternative modes of futuring. In his PhD thesis he deals with the future of work and utopias of automation. Philipp is co-founder and board member of the Zentrum Emanzipatorische Technikforschung (ZET), a progressive technopolitical think tank based in the German-speaking countries.

James Muldoon

James Muldoon leads our Autonomy_Digital strand of research. He is a lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter. His research concerns the history of workers’ movements and democratic socialist politics. He is the author of Building Power to Change the Word: The Political Thought of the German Council Movements and the editor of Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics and The German Revolution and Political Theory. He is currently working on a project on democratising digital platforms.